Shepherd: A Memoir

Chapter Six

107 CHAPTER SIX You meet some seemingly warm and fuzzy people who love animals to a self-sacrificing degree in the livestock biz. —e-mail to our former minister I wanted to rename the farm. “Lost Valley” described the bottom ground now submerged beneath Lake Snowden. And people in this region of hills and hollows had called countless farms Lost Valley or Hidden Valley. The farm itself was hidden, even secretive, despite the tree disaster and the curiosity we’d aroused, but I wanted a name that meant something to me. As a boy, I’d loved naming animals. At the age of five, living at Stage Road Ranch, I called my blue parakeet Hattie; I have no idea where the name originated, yet it still sounds perfect. A laying hen years later in Florida was Vinnie Polivar Simon Ficus, a grandiose moniker for a little red hen, though Vinnie offset the effect. I’d developed the precept that one should commune with an animal before bestowing its name. In the case of our farm, I now wish I’d consulted Claire, who named with creative gusto. My first attempt was prosaic, adult: Lakeview Farm. I rolled it around in my head, ordered a custom mix of bluegrass seed called Lakeview Farm Blend, and saw it printed on the sack. Soon it sounded generic on my ear, like a subdivision selling lots. Farm names are a genre that farmers Richard Gilbert 108 soberly respect, even as they sometimes choose whimsical ones. I decided our farm’s name should either be thoroughly practical and descriptive— Gilbert Stock Farm—or evocative of the land. One mild winter afternoon I sat on my truck’s tailgate in the clearing at the heart of the farm. With the soaring tulip poplars at my back, I focused on the triangular hemlocks that flanked the lane into the north pasture. Water, trickling from the high field into the hemlocks’ sequestered vale on the edge of the farmyard, kept the soil moist and fertile. Our house would face the evergreens’ entwined, upward-swept branches. Eastern hemlocks, I knew, grew naturally in the region, their seed carried into Appalachia from Canada by the meltwater of glaciers; you saw them in remote hollows where streams rippled and rocks erupted from the hillsides. This domesticated pair must have been planted by Mabel and Kenneth Vaught. Their doing such a thing, and their choice of species, and the fact that the finicky hemlocks were thriving bespoke love, aesthetic appreciation, and the spirit of the place. I decided to call the farm Hemlock Valley. On Monday when I told my boss, David Sanders—director of the press and a poet—he pointed out the death imagery associated with the word hemlock because of the poisonous herb. Looking up in wonder at our trees, I’d stubbed my toe on death. Then I remembered a place the farm and its old trees reminded me of. In Georgia we’d lived near a spring that welled up in the flatland where pine woods had been given over to peanuts and cotton. The spring remained, surrounded by a fringe of oaks hung with Spanish moss. Locals all knew it as the best swimming hole in Lee County—possibly the best in the State of Georgia—deep and cold, not half a mile from the lukewarm Muckalee Creek that meandered along the eastern border of Stage Road Ranch. One summer after we’d moved away, on our annual visit the teenage daughter of one of Mom’s friends took me there. The rows of cotton surrounding the oasis were dark green, with heavy velveteen leaves that seemed to nod in the heat. Here, at age twelve, I sensed around me a lost landscape, a ghost world of longleaf pines and wire grass. We moved into the shade of the oaks and I stared at the water. The spring stared back, a blue eye. “It’s bottomless,” Susan said. Water bulged at the surface from a powerful submerged force, then spread and flattened. The silent upwelling Shepherd 109 was mesmerizing. And menacing, though its threat felt different from that of the alligators I imagined swimming nearby in the shallow muddy creek. The pool’s unknown depth and the strange enticement of its pulsating force were what frightened me. My eyes got lost in the blurry swirl, and I couldn’t see any footing beyond a narrow rim of sand. Looking into the aquamarine water, I resisted its...